Joel Connelly: Puget Sound money in federal pipeline

A handsome sum of federal cash, to underwrite launching of the Puget Sound cleanup, is included in the Omnibus Appropriations bill passed yesterday by the U.S. House of Representatives.

The $20 million appropriation is a twenty-fold increase over the $1 million contained in President Bush’s original budget proposal to Congress.

“I think this gives us a really good start: This will give them (the state of Washington) money to do the science and develop the plan,” said Rep. Norm Dicks, D-Wash., chairman of the House Interior Appropriations bill.

“I’m real proud of this, and it isn’t an earmark,” Dicks exclaimed. “This was in the president’s budget. We have the right to increase the president’s budget.”

Gov. Chris Gregoire, in a meeting with Seattle P-I editors, described the appropriation as “getting us on the map” in terms of the nation’s environment restoration priorities.
The federal government has spent billions of dollars — not all of it wisely — on restoring water flow to the Everglades, cleaning up pollution in the Great Lakes, and attempting to save aquatic life in Chesapeake Bay.

“We learned in Chesapeake and the Great Lakes that not having a plan means there will be no recovery,” Dicks said.

Through the Puget Sound Partnership, the state is committed to first drawing up a plan and setting priorities for restoring the sound.

Gregoire and Dicks have also worked on a division of tasks. The federal government will do scientific research on pollutants and their sources.

“We’ll do the work,” Gregoire said. “The people want to see results from an effort such as this.”

As well, the state is asking for the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency to establish an office in Tacoma.

A prominent Republican, former EPA director William Ruckelshaus, is chief overseer of the cleanup. David Dicks, an environmental attorney and son of the congressman, is executive director of the Puget Sound Partnership.

In his Appropriations Committee post, Rep. Dicks is keeper of the purse strings for a variety of federal land management agencies — the National Park Service, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, the U.S. Forest Service and EPA.

He wrote an ambitious budget earlier this year, seeking to restore deep budget and staff cuts endured during the Bush administration.

With Bush threatening a veto, however, spending for the Interior Department, EPA and other agencies had to be pared back in the Omnibus bill — which funds most domestic agencies for the coming year.

Dicks, who waited 30 years to become a subcommittee chairman on Appropriations, was celebrating a few victories in the final bill.

The popular Park Service budget was increased substantially, giving the agency money to fill jobs that have gone vacant due to bare-bones budgets.

An additional $29 million to the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service budget will permit the refilling of 400 positions cut across the country. The job loss has left dozens of federal wildlife refuges without staffing.

“We’re in there for about $188 million on climate change,” Dicks boasted.

And the budget for the National Endowment for the Arts — long targeted for elimination by the political right — has been increased a modest $20 million, up to $145 million.